Dec 122010
 

Colonel Walter Polhill examines a very early edition of ECO

Today I’d like to introduce (or perhaps for some of you who are very well read, reintroduce) Hebden Bridge Chess Club members to a new guest columnist; Colonel Walter Polhill (Retired). The Colonel’s editorial was first published in The Independent on Sunday back in the mid to late ninties and he mainly concerned himself with the moral code associated with the game. In today’s regergitated post he debates whether or not standards of decency at the board may be on the wane.

I was reminded of Colonel Polhill’s articles (and the one below in particular) when I played a fun game (the second one in the viewer below) on the Chess.com website. If you want to see a game with pieces being placed and left enprise in the most outrageous fashion then there is no better opening line to study than this bloodthirsty line of the Classical Sicilian.

Now, over to the Colonel who introduces the first of the two games in the Chess Tempo viewer at the bottom of this post.

“There is an unhealthy mood of bravado laced with machismo running through modern Russian chess. In the old days, captures were met with the politeness of a recapture and any player with pretensions to be considered a gentleman would retreat a piece that his opponent had attacked. Such old formalities, however, are no longer observed, as the following game attests”

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Download games
ChessTempo PGN Viewer

  2 Responses to “Retreat and Recapture, it’s the Right Thing to do!”

  1. This was the game you showed me a couple of weeks ago, I think it is a great game, such a fun line to play with White!!

    However I am intersted to where you found the move 16.Nxg7 as in my main source of the Sozin by Golubev (albiet an old book, 2001)he doesn't mention it, only 16.Qh5 and 16.Rg3 as you stated in the annotations.

    See you tomorrow

    Nick

  2. Oh I see the newspaper, is this main-line now?

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